The centrality of relationship to the transmission and practice of the dharma is hidden in plain view. Sometimes I imagine the Buddha in contemplation, watching the sunrise while reflecting on sangha, friendship, and the role of relationships in the path to freedom. Later, he sits surrounded by eager faces listening attentively, and he teaches that in the same way the dawn precedes the rising sun, so too is spiritual friendship the “forerunner, the harbinger” of the eightfold path.
When his disciple Ananda says friendship is “half of the holy life,” the Buddha responds, “Don’t say that, Ananda. Don’t say that. Admirable friendship is the whole of the holy life.”
One or more of those listening, their hearts filled with inspiration, commits the teaching to memory. They tell others, who tell others, the teachings transmitted from speaker to listener, from teacher to student, over millennia.
“A shift in expression on our Insight Dialogue partner’s face sends ripples of thought and sensation moving through our body. We humans are so exquisitely sensitive.”
The whole of the holy life! You may find this perplexing, since so much emphasis is placed on the individual meditator in Western Buddhist practice. Pause for a moment. How tender, complex, and important are your relationships with people? How often during meditation are you preoccupied with thoughts about others? The power of our relational lives
is key to our suffering and essential to our liberation. We exist within a web of relationships: with specific people, groups, and the wider world. The dharma reveals this relatedness. Can our meditation practice also reflect it?
Evolving from traditional Insight meditation, Insight Dialogue harnesses the potency of relationship as a path of awakening. It interweaves meditative qualities and dharma teachings, amplifying their power with the potency of relational contact. Meditators practice together, facing each other in meditation, eyes open. This expresses the shared intention to cultivate meditative qualities and explore present-moment experiences. Supported by our partner, mindfulness is amplified, as are our energy and investigation.
However, the allure of interpersonal contact can disturb the mindfulness and calm that may arise in solitary meditation. To help meet this challenge, and guide practice deeper, Insight Dialogue is supported by six meditative guidelines: Pause, Relax, Open, Attune to Emergence, Listen Deeply, and Speak the Truth.
These guidelines support our tuning in to the meditative qualities described by the Buddha as the factors of awakening, including mindfulness, investigation, and equanimity. Let’s explore each guideline in turn.
The guideline Pause will be familiar to most meditators—it’s basically mindfulness. Pause invites us to both pause in time as we speak and listen, and to interrupt habitual thought patterns. Pause calls us to be aware in the moment and to rest attention in the body. What sensations and thoughts are present? Are we aware of the person we’re practicing with? Often, our social habits, drives, and anxieties dominate our thoughts when we engage relationally. We can lose mindfulness and become caught in reactivity. Pause offers the possibility of relating from awareness rather than habit.
Relax invites us to notice areas of unnecessary tension, whether muscularly or mentally, and soften what can be softened. Simultaneously, we receive and accept what cannot be softened. Relax invites us to rest into the way things are, whether pleasant or unpleasant. This is awareness infused with compassion and equanimity.
The next guideline, Open, draws directly from the Satipatthana Sutta, inviting meditators to cultivate mindfulness internally, externally, and both. When practicing Insight Dialogue, we sit together with one or more meditators, abiding in the mindfulness of our internal experience. But we also abide in mindfulness externally, including the other meditator(s) in our field of awareness. A shift in expression on our Insight Dialogue partner’s face sends ripples of thought and sensation moving through our body. We humans are so exquisitely sensitive.
This is a subtle practice; it is easy to get lost. If we are enchanted by relational pleasure, we lean toward the other. If experiencing aversion, we lean away. Open invites mindfulness into this relational dynamic, expanding mindfulness to include “you” as well as “me,” to a mindfulness of “we.” The boundaries of internal and external blur. With this practice, our relational capacity ripens, as do the meditative qualities of investigation and energy. Grounded in mindfulness, the reality of nonseparation can bloom and with it, the joy of being released from the confines of the self.
Attune to Emergence points to the energy and uncertainty of impermanence. Meditators attend to the moment-to-moment arising and passing of phenomena. There’s uncertainty about what’s next, and with it, the possibility of something to emerge, unfiltered by habit. We rest in the stream of life happening through us, in the unfolding itself.
Established in these four meditation guidelines—Pause, Relax, Open, and Attune to Emergence—we enter into speech while maintaining meditative awareness. Can speaking really be part of an Insight practice? With the guideline Speak the Truth, we observe present moment experience, guided by core dharma teachings. From all the thoughts arising in the mind that could be spoken, we discern what feels most true to say. Such truth can only be known by mindfulness here and now.
Words can transition from concepts to experience only when we Listen Deeply, with all our senses. From our partner’s efforts, we gain access to other perspectives and to meditative momentum. It’s a potent dynamic, where well-aimed relationality amplifies and accelerates meditation and wisdom.
In Insight Dialogue, the dharma guides our investigation of experience. For example, a contemplation exploring how generosity may or may not be manifesting in the present moment might lead me to notice mindfulness of my resistance to speaking. Alternatively, I might be speaking and notice the generosity of that here and now. Contemplations on death, conceit, or compassion unfold similarly. What feels most true now? The illuminative power of the contemplation catalyzes the process. Explored in relational practice, the dharma becomes embodied experience.
This practice, weaving the benefits of individual meditation into our relational lives, has never been more necessary in our current world of war, injustice, and ecocide. Insight Dialogue widens the realm of practice from “me” to “we.” It’s a path of wise relation. Many of the problems our species face are due to a failure in relationship. With Insight Dialogue practice, we come to understand our intrinsic interdependence.